Retiring from the military can be an exciting time and an opportunity to apply your hard-earned experience to the civilian sector. However, if a job offer doesn’t materialize and it takes a long time, it can become a very daunting period.
“Nobody talks about the pressure you have when you have three kids and a wife or a husband and you can’t find a job,” said Navy Lt. Col. Jay Salters. Mil Mentoring Program through Service to Success.
Milmentor is a career platform designed to connect military personnel and military spouses with industry professionals who serve as volunteer mentors and help them navigate various career fields and paths.
“What people don’t talk about is, ‘How do you get out of that spiral?'” said Salters, who now works as a crypto warfare officer. “You lose. So how do you bounce back when you’ve been down for a whole year? For me, it’s mentorship. It provides accountability and motivation and helps you deal with those situations, and also helps you get back on your feet within the industry.” It also provides visibility.
Service to Success is a for-profit business that provides free career support to veterans and military spouses, and is designed to be a one-stop shop for military members as they enter new jobs and careers after leaving the military. The service offers mentorship, access to an online job portal, and career events such as workshops and job fairs. Salters, CEO of Service to Success, said the organization’s revenue comes from event sponsorships.
Jay Salters.
Courtesy photo.
If you are leaving the military and starting a new career, having an informed guide is very important.
“If you try to jump in headfirst without putting yourself in the game, you might end up with a completely different result than you actually expected,” he said. “One of the best passages is how to understand how to get from point A to point B from someone who is already there.”
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Making a lateral transition from a military career specialty to a similar field in the civilian sector may require replacing buzzwords in favor of plain English, but applying military experience to an unrelated career field may require replacing buzzwords in favor of plain English. It can be difficult to do so.
“Your network is your net worth, that’s what a lot of people say, right?” Salters said. “And you can have a sphere of influence of people who do it, and you can have them guide you. That’s why we wanted to push it in that direction.”
The unemployment rate for veterans is lower than that for civilians, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall unemployment rate for veterans in 2023 is 2.8% and 3.6% for non-veterans, but The period can be a shock to the system.
“It’s a culture shock,” Salters said. “You just follow orders and do what you’re supposed to do, and you go from feeling like everything was set to you. And now you’re like, ‘How do I find this career path?’ .
In other words, trading the military’s clear but rigid hierarchy for the flexibility and independence of civilian life could mean losing some of the guardrails and built-in support systems.
But just because you retire from the military doesn’t mean you can stand on your own.
“The first thing they need to understand is the direction they’re going in,” Salters said of civilians considering a career change after leaving the military. “They need to be able to talk to anyone.” he added. You can understand it to a certain extent because you want to find as many people as possible who are aligned with the direction you want to go. ”
That way, he continued, you don’t have to start from scratch, but instead figure out where you want to land and “then reverse engineer it.” “It at least helps you understand the lay of the land. It’s not the same as the military.”
To launch Mil Mentors, Service to Success collaborated with Act Now Education, a nonprofit that provides employment resources for military members and veterans, and a nonprofit that provides educational resources from certifications to textbooks, tutoring, and college applications. We have partnered with the for-profit organization Boots to Books. Support for military and veteran communities. (Task & Purpose is owned by Recurrent Ventures, which also owns Military Influencer Conference. Act Now Education offers its members tickets to Military Influencer Conference.)